Google Earth has probably seen its usage fall pretty severely in the last couple of years - everyone I know who still uses or talks about it is of the older generation - but it still has some pretty cool features. One of those is Timelapse, the ability to see certain places change as time moves forwards. Today, Google is updating Timelapse with petabytes of new data, four layers of imagery, and sharper pictures across the board. This update utilizes imagery, new techniques, and resources used to update both Google Maps and Google Earth earlier this year.

Let's be real here: we live on a beautiful planet. While some of our fascinations lie in what is beyond our rock in space, I think that we should take the time to appreciate what we're standing on. It is quite impossible that any one person can see all that this world has to offer, which is why Google Earth is so cool. Today marks the next step for exploring our homeworld by adding the virtual reality element with the appropriately named Earth VR.

Before Street View and PhotoSpheres and Local Guides programs with millions of user-submitted photos, there was Panoramio. The site launched in 2005 as a way for users to share geotagged photos around the world and was later acquired by Google in 2007. Its Google Earth and Maps layers boast nearly 100 million user-contributed images, with many locations around the globe offering more pictures than what's available from Maps user submissions.

However, back in 2014, Google had decided to shut down Panoramio and fold it into Maps. That decision was met with some push back from the community, and thus resulted in the delay of the final doom and Google working to implement more social features and contributions in Google Maps to make the Panoramio shutdown more tolerable.

The Landsat 8 satellite was launched by NASA in 2013 to snap photos of Earth in higher detail than was possible before. This is an open project, so you can dig through all the data if you want. Today, we get to enjoy the benefits of Landsat 8 in a more convenient way. Google has rolled out improved worldwide satellite imagery in Google Earth and Maps using the data acquired by this satellite.

Google Earth debuted way back in 2005, long before Android existed in any meaningful way. It was a borderline magical experience at the time—you could just open a program and see the entire planet from orbit. Google Earth might be old news now, but Google is celebrating the anniversary with a new discovery feature. It's only on the desktop right now, but "Voyager" shows you the best things available in Google Earth.

Google is rolling out a big update to the Google Earth app, and as usual it's a staged deployment. Never fear, we are here with an APK download. In this new version (8.0) you'll find better 3D images, cleaner maps, KML import, and more.

What’s New

Google hasn't updated the changelog on the Play Store yet, but there's a whole blog post about Google Earth v8.0. The gist of it is that 3D images will look much better now with the new rendering engine. Roads will also get nicer labels and updated data at the same time as Google Maps going forward.

Google Maps is practical, but Google Earth is kind of the show off side of Google's mapping project. You can explore satellite imagery from all over the world and check out detailed 3D photos of many areas. Now there's even more to see in Google Earth with the addition of your geocoded Google+ photos.

Maps 7.1 is slowly rolling out into the world. Google is making this teardown particularly difficult, because they haven't even gotten around to releasing a change log yet - it's up to me to come up with something. First though, we need to cover the good stuff that most definitely won't be in the change log, because this has me excited:

When you set out to map the entire Earth, if you do it right, you're going to end up with a lot of data. Google Maps has a constant stream of information coming in from a ton of sources - its own Street View cars, satellite imagery, governments, and users all over the world. Once you have all of that information, how do you deal with it? What happens when the government map doesn't perfectly match the satellite image? How do you make sure that a "No Left Turn" sign is reflected in the turn-by-turn directions?

As outsiders, we've always just assumed the answer to this is "magic," but it turns out, it's all handled by a program called "Google Atlas" - an internal-only tool used to manage Google Maps data.

Google Maps has been performing solid, mostly thankless service for more than eight years now, and last week its most significant update yet was leaked. It's that time of year, so we naturally assumed that we'd be hearing more about it at today's Google I/O keynote, but someone in Mountain View must have been a little quick on the trigger. Droid Life spotted a signup page for the revamped web interface and managed to grab a few screenshots before it was hastily shoved back in the digital closet.

Between this and a string of small maintenance updates to Google Maps for Android (not to mention a name change - the Play Store entry is just "Maps" now) we think there's a pretty good chance that the Google Maps app will also get a major overhaul in the very near future.